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Deaf Like Me: The Inspiring Story of a Family's Struggle to Reach Across the Barriers of Silence
Deaf Like Me The Inspiring Story of a Family's Struggle to Reach Across the Barriers of Silence Author:Thomas S. Spradley, James P. Spradley The heartbreak, love and anxieties of all parents of handicapped child are simply and movingly expressed in this story of a family's desperate fight to teach their deaf daughter to speak so she will be considered "normal". — When doctors give their baby girl a clean bill of health following a rubella scare during pregnancy, Lynn'... more »;s parents can scarcely contain their relief. Only gradually do htey suspect that she is not responding properly to sounds; it takes over a year for doctors to confirm their worst fears: Lynn is diagnosed as profoundly deaf.
Warned by experts that they must not communicate through gestures, that they must constantly talk to their daughter as they would to a hearing child, that only by learning to lip-read will Lynn ever be able to speak and enter the world of the hearing, Lynn's parents begin the agonizing task of teaching their toddler to distinguish between a myriad of look-alike lip movements for words she has never heard and can't understand. Deaf Like Me records their moments of discouragement and frustration, and then, miraculously, their first jubilant triumphs as Lynn begins to show some slow but steady progress.
But as school age approaches and words and language take on new importance, Lynn's own pent-up frustrations begin to explode into violent temper tantrums. Still clinging to hope, her parents meet a deaf couple, and with their help , they learn how t look at the world through their daughter's eyes. Realizing that Lynn may never talk, they make a courageous decision that flies in the face of everything they have been told by doctors, audiologists, psychologists and teachers.
The result is a moving story of how a small deaf girl breaks through the chains of ignorance and prejudice that have held her mute for five years -- to discover a world she cannot hear and to teach her family what love and being normal really means. « less